The story you tell yourself about yourself, is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

If you think life is hard, good stuff happens to bad people and you constantly have to prove yourself in order to “achieve happiness”, then that will always be true for you.

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In order to create change in your life, in order to allow things to be “easy”, you need to review your own story. You need to look at the facts and see if you really interpreted them correctly all this time. What else could those facts mean?

The events and experiences in your life shape your character, beliefs and attitude. If the meaning you have attached to them holds you back in your life, then it’s worth re-interpreting them with a more beneficial meaning and re-telling your story in a way that makes sense and is believable to you.

That takes some work, yes. It means taking off layers of limiting beliefs. It means questioning rules that you have made up for yourself and lived by all your life. It means questioning who you think you really are!

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The outcome, though, is so worth it. The true story that you will uncover is always more beautiful than the one you’ve been telling yourself so far.

When you connect with your true essence – confidence, creativity, inspiration and meaning just offer themselves to you. Magic happens and your next step suddenly becomes very clear.

There’ll be no need to look in all the wrong places anymore.

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Last week, two of my clients told me they quit their jobs and will go travelling for a few months. One doesn’t know if she’ll ever come back.

I admire the courage and confidence they have developed in less than a year and I love hanging out with women who don’t accept “semi-happiness”! I’m amazed how they took responsibility and turned “reacting to circumstances” into “creating the life they want”.

You can do it, too.

Don’t settle for less!

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Contact Anja if you want to change your story, too.

1. Open your diary, filofax, Outlook, phone, or whatever else you use to keep track of your schedule.

2. Pick any random day next week or next month to be “Good News Day”. Write it into your diary in bold!

3. On the day, pay attention! Make a note of every piece of good news that comes your way on that day.

Don’t plan it, don’t force it…

It’s important to make it a random day. It doesn’t matter if it’s a weekend or a weekday, it doesn’t matter where you’re going to be that day.
Make it a random day and let the universe surprise you! Just keep your eyes open and pay attention on that day – the good news can be big or small.

Don’t fall into to the trap of “willing” a certain day to be a good news day, (for example when you expect a pay rise or the day of the lottery draw). That will make you focus only on that one thing and you won’t pay attention to any other direction the good news might come from.

Just get excited and be curious that day…

4. Come back here and leave a comment below or on the Virtual Anja Facebook page and tell us what good news you received on your good news day!

5. Put another good news day in your calendar.

What you’ll notice…

…is that over time, you’re going to have more and more good news days in your life, even though you didn’t mark them “good news day” beforehand…

Seven Qualities of A Calling

1. You feel an unusually vivid pain or frustration around the status quo of a particular issue or topic. You feel or see what’s lacking. Maybe there’s a particular problem in the world — climate change, homelessness in your own, or the lack of arts education for kids, that keeps tugging at your heart, popping up in your mind. What need or problem in the world — or as close as on your own neighborhood block — is whispering to you?

2. You see a powerful vision — vague or clear — about what could be. One of my clients has a long-held vision for a community garden in her city. Another has a strong vision — and insight — about how parents can more effectively deal with troubled teens. What vision keeps showing up in your mind’s eye? What future possibility do you see? What if you could put aside the voices of self-doubt, of judging that vision, and trust that it is your work to bring it into the world?

3. You feel as if you’ve received an assignment, rather than that you chose the particular task or cause. Callings are “assignments to bring a particular kind of light into the world.” You feel called, pulled. You have a mysterious sense of “this work is mine to do.”

4. Doing the calling is a magical, strengthening process. You receive an incredible energy and a sense of meaning, rightness, from doing the work. You feel a kind of flow while working on it. As Oprah put it, our callings “light a spark” within us, and that spark allows us to “illuminate the world.”

Callings have some surprising qualities too:

5. You feel resistance to going for your calling. It brings up a kind of fear. A part of you wants to run the other direction. It may feel like your calling upends your ego’s plans for your life. In the archetypal hero’s journey, Step 1 of the journey is “hearing the call”. Step 2? “Resisting the call!” It’s a normal part of the process. The key is surrendering the resistance and stepping into the calling.

6. You don’t — yet — have everything you need to have to complete it. There are resources you don’t possess now — perhaps money or the team team — that you need to do the calling well. Many of us delay work on our callings because we see we don’t have everything we need to complete them. But not having everything you need is actually one of the defining characteristics of a calling. Begin. You will gather and be met by what you need as you move forward.

7. You aren’t — yet — the person you need to be to complete the calling. It’s not just your inner critic talking! It’s the truth: you aren’t quite up to the task. You don’t have the strengths and courage and skills you’ll need. But you will grow into them by doing the calling. Callings always grow us in some meaningful way. In fact, that is their dual function: to grow us and to enrich the world. You will evolve, develop new capacities, and show up to life in new ways in order to fulfill your calling, and that is a blessing.

What do these seven qualities illuminate about your own calling? What has your journey discovering your calling been like? I hope you’ll share in the comments.

Tara Sophia Mohr is a writer, teacher and speaker whose work focuses on helping women create more freedom, peace, and contribution in their work and lives. She received her MBA from Stanford University. To receive Tara’s free workbook, “10 Rules for Brilliant Women,” sign up here.

While it’s so easy to pass on information to 1,000s of people in an instant, we’re losing the ability to truly connect on a human level with other people.

As a service provider, this can be your downfall. In this age of abundance, consumers have too much choice of who to buy their products and services from. If all the products are the same and cost the same – where will they go? Where they get the best service. Where they are treated well. Where they get help in a friendly and quick way. Where they feel appreciated for being a customer.

Trying to think of creative ways to “change the customer’s behavior” and prevent them from complaining on twitter, facebook, etc. is futile. That’s trying to change a symptom without treating the cause.

Customers’ opinions on social media are symptoms. They are results, outcomes of experiences they had with your company. They can be good. They can be bad.

If you’re not happy with the symptoms, how about trying to change the cause?

You want customers to talk about you on social media. They can be your strongest sales force, your most powerful marketing allies! …If they talk about you positively. So what would it take for you to have them talk positively about you?

Improve your customer service.

Focus on changing the behavior of your customer service staff. And remember that their behavior is also a symptom: if they do not deliver the outstanding service you expect – why is that? Do they lack knowledge, skills or motivation?

Do they know how to truly connect with your customers on a personal, human level? Do they know how to surprise your customers with genuine customer “care” – something that we don’t get to experience often anymore it these fast times?

Your employees are your most important customers

And most importantly – do they care? Are they interested in giving your customers the best service? Only a happy employee will create a happy customer.

Your employees are your most important customers. Are they happy? Are you showing as much interest in them as you show into your customers? What does it take to motivate and engage them again? How can you be a better service provider to your employees?

Type “customer service” into twitter. You’ll see how the negative “avoid this company”- tweets outnumber the “go to this company, I highly recommend them”-tweets.

What would it take for your company to turn this around?

Turn it into a game! Let your customer service staff be the players!

How can you involve your customer service staff to turn this into a game and set goals to leave their customers so happy, that they’re going to tweet about it to the whole world?

Have positive social media coverage about your company be a result.

Let your outstanding customer service be the cause.

I do!

I’ve made it a habit to make a note of all the good things I created (or you might say “that happened to me”) every day. I collect them all in a recurring reminder in my calendar, every Sunday.

I’ve noticed how fast we forget. I’ve noticed that we remember bad stuff longer than good stuff. And sometimes we get frustrated because things don’t seem to move forward as fast as we would like them to.

But then Sunday comes around and I look at my “Done-List” for the week and go, wow, I totally forgot about this great meeting I had, which could create so many opportunities. I forgot that I finally made that phone call that I had kept postponing for ages. I forgot about that wonderful testimonial I received from a client.

Most of us have to-do list, which keep us focused on the future and keep us rushing on and on. A done-list is an opportunity to stop and reflect. To remember. To realize that things aren’t moving that slow; that we’ve actually been busy “creating” on a daily basis. It’s a chance to give ourselves a moment to be proud of what we have achieved and be grateful for the opportunities that have arisen.

As employees, we notice when we’ve achieved something. We get a bonus, we get a pad on the back, we hear about it in our annual reviews; our manager gives us recognition for it (some managers really do ). But we don’t have managers in our private lives or in our small businesses. We report only to ourselves. That’s what a done-list helps you do: to report good news back to yourself.

Life’s moving too fast these days and happy moments tend to fly by so quickly we hardly notice them anymore. Unless we take the time; a moment to reflect and allow ourselves to feel successful.

What was your happiest moment last week?
What was a moment in which you felt really successful last week?

If you can’t answer these two questions, or if it takes you a long time to come up with something – I invite you to try out a Done-List for the next 7 days!

If your staff currently is not creating pleasant experiences for your customers, a training on “How to give better service” might not be the solution.

Most people intrinsically know the “HOW”. They just need a good enough reason to get creative. And that is exactly what is lacking in many employees these days: the WHY.

Why should I give better service? Why should I care about my employer’s clients? One client more or less won’t make me lose my job…

As a business owner, this is the first inquiry you should engage in: ”WHY should my staff give better service to my clients? What’s in it for them? I am passionate about my business, but are they?”

Ask the HOW question to yourself:

How can I can give better service to my employees?

Your employees are your number one customer. If you fail to turn them into loyal, happy employees, how could they possibly transmit this positive feeling, enthusiasm and experience to your customers?

So much money is being wasted by pushing knowledge about the HOW into your staff.

Start by pulling knowledge about the WHY (or WHY NOT?) out of your staff first.

• Show interest in them.
• Pay attention to their needs.
• Take them seriously and respond.
• Create new solutions WITH them (i.e. use their input to train their managers to treat them better).
• Then reap the benefits.

It’s exactly what you’d do with your customers:

• What do they (the “market”) need?
• Adjust your services accordingly and give them what they need.
• Then reap the benefits.

Ask. Give. Receive.

In a quest to improve people management skills, Google had a team analyze countless performance reviews and feedback surveys, turn them into code and hard numbers over a period of several months, only to come up with the following:

“… [They] found that technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight.

What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers…”

Oh really?

Now there are certainly going to be responses popping up all over the place, resonating with Stever Robbins, who says, “Wow. That’s an eye-opener. I’ll bet no one’s ever observed that before.”

Admittedly my first reaction was the same. The time and money it must have consumed to come to a result of “Duh!” …

On the other hand, being familiar with personality types, it occured to me that we do have to recognize that an organization like Google consists to a large percentage of data-driven analyzers. It comes with the territory. If you’re very data driven, something has to give – that’s usually people skills. It’s the very reason why “data geeks” often are not great people managers (by nature. That doesn’t mean they can’t become very good at it.)

And let’s not ignore that the opposite is true, too: Try to keep a “people geek’s” attention long enough to explain them a simple Excel sheet…

People only become motivated to change, when the reasons for change make sense to them.

The only way to convince a data geek to change is with data-driven analyses and statistics. They need proof that makes sense to THEM (=numbers, data), in order to “get it” and see a reason to change. Geeks need geeky measures

So if this approach made the managers “coachable” and open for change; if  they’ll become better people managers to their staff now, then this “waste of time” might have been an effective means to a good end, don’t you think?

What you focus on expands.

Energy flows where attention goes.

If all your attention and focus goes into your work, that’s what grows. But what if the job alone doesn’t make you happy anymore? What if it actually took a turn and begins to make you unhappy? What if there are suddenly different ideas about life, work and your future knocking on the surface of your consciousness? What if you suddenly begin to question your decisions that led you here?

The women I work with often carry those questions around with them. On one hand they rationalize with themselves and go, “Hey, I should be happy with what I have! I have nothing to complain about.”

When that doesn’t make the funny feeling go away, though, they feel something’s wrong with them. Because they’re not 100% happy where they are in life right now, it must mean they have taken wrong decisions at some point in the past. And then they “take responsibility” and beat themselves up about it: “How stupid! It’s all my fault! I should have known! I have no-one else to blame but me!”

Newsflash. It’s not stupid to make a wrong decision. Decisions move us forward in life. We’ll never know if they’re right or wrong until later. Most successes are the result of many failures. We can always correct our course along the way – provided we know where we want to go.

The decisions we made in the past made sense at the time. They were the right decisions to make with the information we had back then and for the person we were back then.

Nobody every says, “I’m going to make a wrong decision now!”

What if you’re right were you’re supposed to be? And if it doesn’t feel like that and you think, “What am I doing here? How did I end up here?” Then there’s a lesson waiting to be learned. And resulting from that, there’s probably a new decision to be made – with the new information and the new learnings and for the new person that you are now. …To create the person you want to be.

Making a wrong decision is not a bad thing. Sticking with a wrong decision is.

Some of them are so caught up with “putting out fires” and covering for other people at work, that it overshadows their whole life and it stops them from moving forward in their own growth. After a 12-hour work day they have neither time nor energy left to pay attention to their own needs.

All of these women have a huge sense of responsibility and loyalty to their employers. They haven’t arrived in their management positions by chance. They are smart decision makers, caring, driven, and very successful.

At least at work.

The surprising truth however is that few of them consider themselves truly successful. Because despite their success at work, they don’t feel they have achieved the same success “in life”. Too much energy goes into work and too little into any other area of their lives – whether that is relationships, family, health, recreation, finances, spiritual growth or simply the relationship with themselves. There just seems to be too little time to remember themselves.

It’s hard to show loyalty to yourself, when you don’t know who you are. It’s hard to take responsibility and action, when you don’t know where you’re going.

It’s so much easier and safe to exert your strengths at work, the only place where things are clearly defined and where all the targets are known. You know when and where to show up everyday, you know what to do, you get rewarded with a paycheck at the end of the month, you get promoted and bit by bit you get pulled in more and more…

Have you every noticed that you can have strengths that you actually don’t enjoy doing? Some of us are required to use those strengths every single day at work! Yes, it’s possible to be drained by our own strengths!

“You can have anything you want in life, but you do have to pay… attention!”

So, what can you do? Make space!

Create mental space that allows you to take stock and see where you are now, how you got here and where you want to go from here. Start paying attention to yourself. Whether that is by talking with friends, hiring a coach or by contemplating the question “What do I really want?” for 5min every morning or night in bed.

Make a start. Find out your “What” and then your “Why”. Don’t worry about the “How” just yet. It will reveal itself once you’ve defined your direction.

To your holistic success!

PS:

The Special Coaching Package I created at the beginning of this year will be discontinued by the end of February. If you do want to work with a coach to learn from your past, take stock where you are now, and make a concise plan for your year ahead, sign up before February 28!

“You can lead a horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink.”

The trick is to make it want to drink.

Whether it’s employees, business partners or networking contacts  whose support you need – recognizing other people’s importance to you and your success, and treating them accordingly will pave your way to gaining their sympathy.

Gatekeepers belong to the group of people whose sympathy you want – they are receptionists, secretaries and personal assistants for example. They are that last “one degree of separation” between you and that important contact you want to get to.

They are the keepers of their boss’s time – your most desired commodity.

Why should you pay attention to the gatekeepers?

Well, just recognize the power they have over you: they might be inferior to you in job title and income level, however if they don’t like you, they won’t let you in. It’s as simple as that.

Recognize their value: they are the keepers of your most desired commodity: their bosses’ time. They are sitting on the treasure that you came here to hunt – and that makes them superior to you. They can either give you a piece of that cake or not.

They are also the ones who can make or break your reputation by painting their boss a good or a bad picture of you. The better they talk about you, the higher your chances for success.

So how can you get them to like and rave about you?

In the same way you get a date to like you, or a potential client, a recruiter – anyone!

Show interest in them. See them. Treat them with respect. Build a relationship with them.

That’s it. Want more?

Make them important enough to take a few minutes out of your day for them.

Remember their names. Ask them how they are when you see them or speak to them. Smile. Ask them about something that they mentioned to you the last time you saw them (“So how was your son’s first birthday party? Did you manage to arrange everything in time?”) Make them go, “Wow, you remember that?”

Watch how Jake Gyllenhall in “Love and other drugs” does it (only be genuine and consistent, and continue being nice even after you received a favor…). You want them to turn to their colleagues and go, “He is sooo nice!” as soon as you leave the room. You want them to look forward to seeing you again. You want them to want to do you favours.

Remember them and they will remember you.

Say thank you, bring a little gift every now and then if appropriate; make them feel appreciated.

Be the person they’d wish their bosses to be!

Treat them with as much respect as you treat their bosses. Make them feel good!

WOO: Win Others Over

All this will help you to become memorable and stick out from everyone else who considers themselves too important to speak with secretaries and assistants. It’s how you authentically WOO: Win Others Over. You get where you want and you make another person feel good in the process. How’s that for a great win-win situation?

Are you a gate keeper yourself? Great, then it’s easiest for you! Imagine how you’d wish to be treated or think of a person who always makes you feel good when they walk into your office. And then do exactly what they do!

Or learn from the people who don’t treat you with respect: they teach you how NOT to do things and you can just go out and do the opposite!

Let’s lead by example! I invite you to join in – from today on.